


I'll be a Brand New Day

by especiallythezefronposter



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Andrew is the Winter Soldier, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Neil is Captain America, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Past Child Abuse, Self-Harm, Slow Burn, The Foxes are Avengers, not that much violence, now it sounds dark but this is honestly pretty light most of the time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-16
Updated: 2017-04-16
Packaged: 2018-10-19 19:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10646532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/especiallythezefronposter/pseuds/especiallythezefronposter
Summary: Neil meets a man who looks a lot like his least favorite teammate, Aaron Minyard, and it ends up changing his life.(A Winter Soldier AU, because this fandom deserves a Winter Soldier AU)





	I'll be a Brand New Day

**Author's Note:**

> Me: *stresses out about writing a 7000 word paper*  
> Also me: *writes 15k of fanfic in a week instead of writing said 7000 word paper*
> 
> If you want to read this without having seen Captain America: The Winter Soldier (which is an awesome movie, would recommend) all you need to know is that Captain America (Neil in this fic) is a guy who got a serum that made him really strong so that he could fight in World War 2, then got frozen in ice for a couple of decades and was found in the present just in time to join the Avengers (a group of super heroes). SHIELD are the good guys, HYDRA are the bad guys. That's it!
> 
> (Also if you have seen TWS, please try not to think about the storyline too much, I've completely ignored it.)
> 
> Here's a list of who's who, to avoid confusion:  
> Seth is Rumlow  
> The Avengers:  
> Neil: Captain America  
> Dan: Black Widow  
> Matt: Hawkeye  
> Andrew: The Winter Soldier  
> Aaron: The Hulk (General Ross is still General Ross, Katelyn isn’t in here but she’s his daughter)  
> Allison: Iron Man  
> Nicky: Spider-Man  
> Renee: Wolverine  
> Kevin: God of Thunder (Which makes Riko Loki)
> 
> (I feel like Neil and Andrew should be tall in this AU but mostly I've tried not to think about it because them being tall just feels Wrong. Does anyone else feel this way?)

Neil breaks Gordon's neck. He knows they're gonna get him anyway. 

He knew there were sleeper HYDRA agents in SHIELD and he'd been keeping a close eye on them, feeling like he had the upper hand. Now it turns out that SHIELD's entire operation is primarily run by HYDRA agents. There's really no way he's gonna fight himself out of this one. So he stands there in the middle of the street, letting Gordon's body drop to the ground, and waits.

At least he doesn't have to be hurt or betrayed. He never trusted his STRIKE team anyway. He should have known they weren't really working for SHIELD, that was stupid on his part, but at least he didn't get attached. At least this wasn't going to be like when his father turned against him.

He grabs Gordon’s gun from his belt when he hears footsteps. Someone rounds the corner of the building to the right, rifle raised. It’s the man who attacked him, who bested him all on his own. They fought a couple times today and the man, the Winter Soldier, is good, quick, fun to fight with. Neil didn't get a good look at him before, but now his mask has come off. 

He's pale, his hair is messy and so blonde it's almost white. His hazel eyes are completely void of emotion. Not like his usual bored stare. In fact he doesn't look like he usually does at all. He's dressed in combat gear instead of a button-up and slacks. One of his hands is made out of metal. He's holding a big-ass rifle. He looks kind of cool, really.

'Minyard? What the fuck?'

The man shoots him in the shoulder. Neil staggers and falls to his knees in the rubble and the dirt.

'Oh, come on!' he yells while he digs the bullet out of his shoulder, keeping his eyes on the man in front of him. It's almost a reflex by now. It hurts like hell, but it's gonna hurt even more if he has to try and get it out later, when the wound's already half healed. 'That's just bad manners, I don't even have a gun.'

The man doesn't say anything, but doesn’t shoot him again, either.

'You look a lot like someone I know,' Neil says, raising his hands, trying to look harmless. 'Aaron Minyard. But you can't be him because he's in New York right now and he doesn't have a metal arm and he'd have walked away by now. He never listens to me talk for this long. So who are you?'

He waits for a moment, but the Soldier doesn't give any input. 'You work for HYDRA, but HYDRA comes from a lot of places, so that's not really helpful. Do you have a name?'

The Soldier doesn't react. Behind him, there's footsteps. Multiple people. Gordon called in reinforcements before he died. They took their time. Neil would yell at them for it if they were still on his side.

It's still so unreal. After Iraq and Afghanistan, he'd figured he could work with SHIELD for a while. He was getting ready to go to Syria, had already gotten permission from the UN and SHIELD. He had already found a couple units who were willing to let him tag along.

Now those plans have to wait. He has to deal with this whole mess instead, will have to fight himself out of whatever facility they'll take him to and run for a while, because he isn't strong enough to fight a HYDRA this big. He’ll have to come up with a plan that goes beyond just beating people up. He’ll have to assemble a team, work with other people.

He's already tired just thinking about it.

The Soldier raises his gun again while the reinforcements arrive. They put Neil in fancy cuffs and cuff his elbows, too, knowing his knack for breaking out of restraints, either by force or skill.

'Good talk,' Neil tells the Soldier as they take him away. 'If you ever wanna do it again, you know where I live.'

Whether the Soldier knows anything at all is unclear, but it isn't hard to look up Neil's current residences in the files of any intelligence agency (probably even Wikipedia). Reynolds Tower in New York when he has nothing to do, The apartment in DC now that he is doing missions with SHIELD, or well, HYDRA... maybe he shouldn't go back there for a while. And a little cabin in Pakistan. 

Neither of his parents have ever been to Pakistan as far as he knows, but it's where his maternal grandparents and his grandfather on his father's side had lived. He likes to pretend that his grandparents' families were functional ones, that Pakistan was the place where his family loved each other before it became the mess he grew up in in the USA.

Maybe he can go out to the cabin for a while. HYDRA seems to be a US-based organization now. Taking this fight to another country would probably get them into all kinds of trouble they'd rather avoid.

Or he could just wait this out in Reynolds Tower. If Reynolds can keep Minyard safe from the US Army and a psycho general in that sky-high atrocity, Neil should be fine. He could throw Minyard at them if they ever got to him in the Tower. They'd be much happier with a Hulk than with a national embarrassment, he's sure.

The HYDRA agents are surprisingly stupid. They don't cuff his legs and put him in a transport with only two guards. Two people in the front of the van, max. Likely only one. 

They take the Winter Soldier - literally the only person who's given Neil any kind of worthwhile fight since he got the serum - somewhere else.

Then one guard shoots the other and takes off her helmet, shaking her head to settle her short hair.

'Wilds! I was gonna do that!'

'With what gun?'

He shrugs, or tries to. It's hard when your elbows are pinned together behind your back.

Dan makes quick work of the restraints around Neil's arms and he thanks her quietly.

'Matt's driving. Just sit tight, we'll change cars soon and drive the rest of the way to New York.'

She taps the partition between the holding area and the driver's seat and it slides away. 'Hi, Neil,' Matt says cheerfully, keeping his eyes on the road. 'You're welcome.'

'Thank you,' Neil mutters. Matt laughs.

'I'm never gonna get to Syria after this, am I?'

'I put every single SHIELD/HYDRA file online an hour ago, so it should only take a day for any organization to see that you're not in any way involved in HYDRA. The UN did announce they'd be launching a full investigation into you and would be revoking their permission for your tour in Syria for now. And the NATO's ready to burn you at the stake, but that isn't new.' Neil is forever glad that the NATO doesn’t have any power over him. They hate his guts even more than all of the other fancy organizations do.

He sighs. 'So we're just gonna sit in Reynolds Tower and wait?'

'Well, Dan and I seem to be out of a job. The three of us could take up yoga. Or pottery. We could go to the zoo!' Matt tosses a plastic bag through the partition and Dan immediately opens it. She starts to pull off the SHIELD uniform and changes into the sweats and a hoodie from the bag. Neil helps her with some of the uniform’s buckles.

'I already do yoga,’ he mumbles.

'You could teach us!'

'Or you guys could help me look into the Winter Soldier? I met him and he looks exactly like Minyard. Only he's nicer than Minyard.'

'Maybe they cloned him in the shady medical program he was part of,' Dan suggests, only half serious.

'And they turned the original angry and green and the clone all creepy and badass? Would they have more of them? I hope they mixed one with a fly.' 

Neil’s knowledge of pop culture is still pretty limited. It doesn’t help that when the Avengers decided to do a regular movie night to help Neil (and Minyard and Walker, who don’t know anything about pop culture either), Matt and Reynolds put themselves in charge of choosing movies and so far their picks for modern classics have been The Fly, Bee Movie, five different Godzilla movies, a very crappy movie about the Hulk that Minyard walked out on before it even started and the Blair Witch Project.

Matt doesn’t turn, but Neil knows he’s rolling his eyes. ‘Only you would think a guy who's trying to assassinate you is badass.'

'Well he is pretty badass. I wasn't gonna say it, but I think his aim is better than yours.'

Matt takes one hand of the wheel to clutch his chest. 'Neil, you have seen me do the Robin Hood shot! How can you say that?'

'I'm sorry, man. The footage doesn’t lie. This guy HYDRA’s after is driving a car at a crazy speed, swerving to dodge any bullets and the Winter Soldier shot that guy in the neck. From a helicopter. That was making a U-turn while he took the shot. He didn’t even use a sniper gun, just a glock.'

'Okay,' Matt concedes. 'That's badass. But I bet he wouldn't have been able to do it with a bow and arrow.'

They stop in a small town and leave the van behind. There's a nice sleek car waiting for them by a gas station. Could be one of Reynolds'. Could be stolen. Neil doesn't care.

Matt takes the wheel again, Dan rides shotgun and Neil curls up on the backseat for a well-deserved nap.

-

When he wakes up, they're in New York. There's no one waiting for them in the parking garage of Reynolds Tower, for which Neil is glad. Neil doesn't really trust Dan and Matt, but it's as close as he'll ever get. He likes them. The rest of the Avengers? Not so much.

Nicky's fine, but he's exhausting. Reynolds and Walker are acceptable, but neither of them can be trusted. Kevin is just an asshole, still butthurt that his alien brother Riko overthrew Asgard, the planet they came from, and banished Kevin to earth, leaving him unable to lift his magic thunder hammer. Minyard is a piece of shit, but he stays away from the common areas, so Neil doesn’t fight nearly as much with him as he does with Kevin.

Neil took a nap in the car, so he heads out to the gym instead of going back to his own floor. He's tried before and even without any training whatsoever his body stays in perfect shape. It feels nice, though, the slight burn in his muscles when he works out, the strength coursing through his body. It's enough to keep his mind occupied for a while.

When he finally goes back to his floor, someone is waiting for him in the living room by the elevator, a living room he personally never uses.

He sighs. 'I'll get something to clean up the blood.'

The Soldier doesn't react, holding one of Reynolds' uncomfortably fluffy towels against his chest. Neil bought rougher ones, but Reynolds seems to have thrown those out while he was in DC.

He gets the bottle of hydrogen peroxide, more towels and a first aid kit. He keeps the light in the living room turned off. His enhanced sight is good enough to stitch in the sparse light.

Also it's better not to be able to see the Soldier too clearly. Part of his face is swollen, his whole body is cut open like someone put him through a carwash where all the carwash parts were replaced with swords (Neil has been to a carwash with one of Reynolds’ cars. It was an Experience). There's blood all the way into his hair.

The Soldier stares at him blankly while Neil takes away the towel to check how the wound underneath is doing.

'Is the bullet out?'

The Soldier opens his fist, lying limply on his thigh. The bullet rolls from his palm onto the floor. Neil’s eyes don’t track to movement, but stay focused on the Soldier’s palm, which is soaked in blood.

Neil stitches up the bullet wound and wets a towel for the Soldier to hold against it. He hopes they won't have to cauterize it. That would suck.

A normal human would have already passed out from blood loss, but the Soldier's physique seems to be closer to Neil's than to that of a regular person, so he'll rather risk it than hurt the Soldier even more by burning the bullet wound shut.

The Soldier's breathing is a little uneven, but he seems fully lucid while he watches Neil sanitize the rest of the wounds and stich the ones that need it. He gives the soldier a cloth covered in disinfectant and lets him disinfect the wounds Neil has already taken care of. Then Neil bandages all of them.

He sets the Soldier's dislocated shoulder and tapes his ribs. The Soldier doesn't make a sound, even when Neil just pulls his arm back into the socket without warning. Neil met a soldier in Iraq who’d been experimented on just like him. She couldn’t feel pain anymore. Maybe the Soldier is like her. Maybe he’s doing much worse than he looks and he doesn’t even realize.

When Neil is done he just sits there, crouched in front of the Soldier while the Soldier stares blankly at the wall.

Finally he goes to get the Soldier a change of clothes.

When he comes back, the Solder is in the bathroom, puking his guts out. There’s no blood with the vomit. That’s good.

The Soldier shivers. His forehead is shiny with sweat. It takes him a couple minutes, but eventually he gets up and rinses his mouth over the sink. He takes the clothes out of Neil’s hands and walks back out of the bathroom.

When Neil comes back into the living room, the Soldier is getting into the elevator. Just like that he's gone again.

-

Neil spends the rest of the week sparring with Kevin and occasionally with Nicky and Dan, though much less intensely than he does with Kevin. Kevin breaks his arm and two of his ribs. Neil is annoyed that he has to sit around and wait for the bones to heal enough that he won't risk them shifting while he works out. Kevin just tells him his defense is still sloppy.

He does look into the Winter Soldier file with Dan, but even with all of SHIELD’s information being leaked, there’s nothing to be found about him. Some grainy surveillance camera footage here and there. Speculation about almost eighty assassinations he could have possibly committed. No name, no identification. The only match they ever found for his face was Aaron, who was quickly ruled out. They can tie him back to the Red Room based on the red star on his metal arm and the kinds of people he usually assassinates, but that only leads to a lot of dead ends. The Red Room kept all of their files on paper and destroyed most of them when their organization started to fall apart. The Winter Soldier is a ghost, that’s the very frustrating conclusion Neil comes to after hours and hours of research.

He isn't allowed to go outside to go running. Half the team is too worried he'll get trampled by journalists or on angry mob. Public opinion is always either in love with him or out for his head, and now that it turns out he's been working for terrorists all along, most people are leaning towards the latter. So he takes the treadmill in the gym on his floor to its limits and tries not to feel like he's locked up.

He's still bummed that he's not going to Syria anytime soon. He's considering going anyway. Without a unit it'd be harder to get where he's the most useful, but there's plenty of NGO's in the area that could use his help and the US government and all of their annoyances will be much less of a bother if he's in another country.

The only thing that's keeping him here is the Soldier. Neil is hoping that he'll show up out of nowhere again and he wants to be here in case it happens.

-

It takes almost a month.

The Soldier looks like he's lost weight since Neil last saw him. He looks tenser, but just as blank as last time.

He's sitting on the couch in the living room by the elevator, eating ice cream that he either brought himself or stole from Kevin or Nicky. Neil doesn't have anything like that on his floor.

Neil sits down in an armchair. The Soldier flinches when he speaks.

'I don't normally use this living room. It has three different entry points if you don't count the window. There's one at the end of the hallway with only one door. Two of the walls are made out of only glass, but we're up so high that it doesn't matter.

The Soldier gets up and waits for Neil to guide the way to the other living room. He can't even hear the Soldier's footsteps when they walk through the hallway.

He has to admit Reynolds has amazing taste in interior design. The room is all warm, earthy colors. Elegant and modern, but homey, too. Neil feels calmer just being there.

They both take an armchair and Neil leans his head back for a quick nap, figuring the Soldier will talk when he's ready.

When he wakes up half an hour later, the Soldier is still sitting there, barely moving at all.

'I have clothes you can borrow, if you wanna change out of that,' Neil says as he smooths down his own clothes a little. He’s wearing joggings and a too big T-shirt. The Soldier is still wearing the clothes Neil gave him last time. Black leggings and a black long sleeved shirt with a black jacket over it that Neil didn’t give him. Fun thing about black fabric is that it’s hard to tell if there’s blood on it. It’s not torn, though, and it doesn’t have any bullet holes that Neil can see.

The Soldier doesn't react for a moment, then shakes his head.

‘Are you hurt anywhere?’

The Soldier’s shoulder moves slightly. Maybe like a shrug. Neil has no idea, he’ll ask again later.

Neil turns on the TV, avoiding action movies and news reels. Eventually he settles on an ice hockey game. After that there's horse riding, which is not as exciting, but still better than gunshots and explosions or news anchors dissecting the whole HYDRA mess.

Eventually the Soldier falls asleep. Neil realizes now that he should have showed him to one of the bedrooms, but he isn't exactly an expert in hospitality.

He turns off the TV and just stares at the wall, trying to figure out how exactly any of the Winter Soldier stuff makes any sense.

He must have drifted off at some point. When he wakes up, the Soldier is leaning against one of the glass walls, looking at the city below.

He doesn’t look up, but somehow he knows Neil is awake. 'They won't look for me here.' He says.

'You left them?'

He doesn't nod or shake his head, just turns his head to look at Neil.

'You can stay as long as you want. There's a ton of guest rooms on this floor and it can only be accessed with my permission, or with your skillset, but there's not that many people out there who can bypass Reynolds' security like that, so you should be safe. Just pick yourself a room. They all have bathrooms attached and there's two kitchens as well, though usually I just order take out. You can, too, if you want. Both Reynolds and SHIELD insisted on paying me and I've given a lot of it away, but I still have more money than I know what to do with.'

The Soldier just turns back to the window. Neil considers this a win, though. He spoke six words. That's already more than Neil expected.

'You have a name?'

The Soldier zips open his jacket and takes something out. He turns long enough to toss it exactly into Neil's hand.

It's a file. There's a picture of the Soldier inside.

'Andrew Minyard,' Neil reads out loud. 'Just like Aaron. Dan gave me a file on you a couple weeks ago. There was way more stuff redacted than in this one, pretty much everything was redacted. We didn't even have a name. Here there's... maybe fifty words that aren't. Wow.' He scans through it quickly. Mostly it's descriptions of the Soldier's physique, which Neil has already noticed. They found a creepy electric chair when flushing out a HYDRA facility last week. There's nothing in the file about that. Nothing about how the Soldier got his metal arm or his super strength. Nothing about where he came from.

There's only one interesting thing other than his name.

'You were born in 1917? Me too! That’s so cool!' It also makes even less sense.

The Soldier - Andrew - turns away from the city to look at him again. Looks seem to be confirmation. That's good to know.

'So how can you look so much like Aaron? You have same the last name an all.' He waves his hand around until Reynolds' AI gets the hint and pulls up a picture of Aaron for him. 'Look, this is Aaron. You guys look alike.'

Andrew gazes boredly at the image, like he's not really seeing it. 

'Maybe you're his uncle or something. Do you know if you had a brother? It doesn't say in the file. Maybe you had a son? It’s possible that you had a life before they made you into a soldier. I sort of did, I guess. But you’re young for a dad. I don’t know.'

Andrew turns back to the window.

'Are you hurt anywhere?', he asks again. He doesn’t really know what else to say.

Andrew shakes his head without turning. A real answer. How nice.

'Okay. Just let me know if you need something. Anything. I'm going to the gym. The other Avengers have access to it too, but normally it should be empty at this hour. And I can ask the AI to warn us if anyone's coming anyway. If you don't wanna go there but you still want to work out, there's a small gym on this floor. It doesn't have a lot of equipment but it will do. Also you can just take any clothes out of my closet, if you’d rather change when I’m not here.'

In answer, Andrew wanders off down the hallway.

When Neil comes back, Andrew’s still dressed in all black. He’s wearing a T-shirt and another pair of leggings and armbands he must have dug out of the bottom of Neil’s closet somewhere. Neil forgot he even owned those. Andrew seems to like them, though.

-

In the following two weeks, Andrew stays. Neil is excited every time he comes back from another room and sees Andrew hasn't left.

He convinces Andrew to spar at one point and it ends pretty quickly, with Neil gasping on the floor. He's laughing and he won't go as far as to say that Andrew is smiling, but his face somehow looks less blank. Neil could just be projecting, though. 

He asks his psychiatrist, who he sees weekly and who isn’t allowed to tell anyone else about what Neil says to her (he makes sure not to mention Andrew is an assassin who has shot Neil several times in the past, in that case she would probably feel obliged to tell on him, though really this can’t be the craziest thing he’s ever told her about). She tells Neil that clearly he’s putting a lot of effort into making Andrew happy. She always does that, answering questions with seemingly unrelated statements.

Neil wins the rematch they do right after, but it's a near thing. They spend almost four hours sparring and it's way more fun than going against Kevin or even Dan. Andrew is pretty much an exact match to his own strength. It's awesome.

Then Andrew stiffens mid-strike and wordlessly makes his way out of the room. Neil knows where he's going. The elevator. He heard the quiet noise of it, too, but he's never considered it a cause for alarm.

He's too slow, too complacent. By time he arrives in the living room by the elevator, Matt's barely breathing in the Soldier's hold.

'Andrew, let him go. He's safe. He isn't even armed.'

To his surprise Andrew immediately drops his grip and Matt stumbles forward, wheezing. 'The fuck, man?'

'I'm sorry,' Neil says because Andrew isn't going to.

Matt sits down on the couch, keeping his eyes on Andrew while he carefully touches his own throat, which is going to start to bruise in a couple hours. It’s already going red. 'The one time you get laid it's by a crazy person who looks like Aaron but with a metal arm?'

'I didn't get laid,' Neil says hollowly. He's starting to panic on the inside. Andrew's definitely gonna run after this.

'Then why the fuck is there a hot guy in your apartment? Why are you both sweaty?'

'We were sparring. And this is Andrew, the Winter Soldier. Andrew, this is Matt.'

Andrew picks up a flat box Matt must have brought with him, looking a little wary like he’s expecting a trap.

'You skipped dinner so I brought you some pizza,' Matt explains. 

'Thanks,' Neil says as Andrew takes out a piece. He walks out of the room, probably to get hot sauce.

'You are harboring a terrorist?', Matt says, trying to keep his voice down, as if Andrew won’t hear him.

'I don't think he actually wanted to do any of that. He was born the same year I was. There's a whole lot of torture and crazy HYDRA conditioning you can fit into a hundred years.'

Both Neil and Matt jump when Andrew speaks up from where he has re-entered the room.

'I entered the program at twelve. Mostly they injected me with things. Then later there was the chair and the wipes and cyro. And pills. I miss the pills.' He's quiet for a while. 'Wipe means that they wipe all of my memories. Sometimes I killed people. They asked me.'

Neil doesn't really know what to say to that, but he doesn't want to discourage Andrew from speaking more. 'Did you want to?'

Andrew's shoulders move minutely. Sometimes the hollowness behind his eyes is still hard to look at. 'I didn't care.'

That must be fucked up. Not having any memories. Not having anyone who cared about him. Not having anything at all. What would it matter of he did nothing or killed someone? In a world empty of everything there isn't much difference between the two.

'You don't have to do any of that ever again,' Neil reassures him.

Andrew doesn't say anything else, but hands Neil a pizza slice, takes another two for himself and leaves the room.

Neil sits down beside Matt and takes a bite of the pizza.

'You have no relatives you still talk to. Three friends you only interact with because we live with you and we actually force you to be around us. You are known to the public for being the most anti-social prick of the nation. And all of a sudden you let a brainwashed assassin Aaron-lookalike move in with you?'

'What a nice thing to say, Matt. I only have two friends from now on.'

'Don't be childish. You're dodging the question.'

Neil sighs. 'He's interesting. And he doesn't talk a lot. He doesn't expect me to be a functioning member of society. Yesterday we got up at twelve am to eat, then napped in the living room until dinner.' Also Neil had two panic attacks in the last week and Andrew didn't get all emotional and worried about him, but he's not gonna tell Matt that. He told Matt panic attacks were over. 'And I don't know why he looks like Aaron. Though after a while you only notice the differences anymore. They aren't alike at all.'

'Neil, we're gonna have to tell the team about him. They're bound to find out at some point and Allison's gonna be pissed if it turns out you've been harboring an unpredictable killer under her roof.'

'He's gonna run,' Neil says. His voice is a little too high, too shaky. He can't help it. He doesn't want Andrew to go.

'You can't just bring someone into someone's house and not tell them.'

'Just Allison and Renee,' Neil tries. 'In a couple of days. Promise.'

Matt sighs. 'There's speculation that the serum messed with your head. That you don't think right anymore. That it's eating away your brain.' It's a low blow, but Matt's tired and he's angry and he’s hurt about Neil hiding something from him. Neil doesn't take it too personally.

'I don't think they're wrong,' he says. His memories don't work the way they should. Sometimes, back in Afghanistan he just wanted to step on a bomb and be blown to pieces. Sometimes when he kills someone, it doesn't feel bad. 'But that's not why Andrew's here.'

'The day after tomorrow you're talking to Allison.'

Neil nods, miserable that this is going to be over so soon.

Matt gives him half a hug before he leaves.

Neil goes in search of Andrew, hoping he's not on the part of the floor that's now off limits to Neil. Andrew hadn't asked him, but Neil had figured that having some space to himself would be good for Andrew, so there's a couple of rooms, including the small bedroom Andrew picked, that he never goes into.

Andrew is on the balcony of the living room with only one door. He's sitting down, leaning against the glass railing and smoking the cigarettes Neil still had lying around. He glances up when Neil comes to sit beside him.

'Hey, Andrew,' he says after they've sat in silence for a while. 'You know that all of the Avengers live in this Tower, right, not just me?' Andrew doesn't react. 'Well, Reynolds owns the Tower and Matt thinks we should at least tell her you live here. She will tell Walker, but the rest can wait.'

He feels like that isn't enough of an explanation. 'Walker is a really calm person, but Reynolds can be a little much sometimes. They're just gonna be curious, though, not mad, and they're not gonna touch you. We’re gonna talk to them the day after tomorrow. You don’t have to come if you don’t want to.'

Andrew just looks at him with that empty stare. Eventually he nods.

They're silent for a while.

'Andrew? How much do you remember?'

'Six weeks after a wipe, everything comes back. Details. I remember you.'

‘Me?’

He shakes his head, like Neil doesn’t get it. ‘Everything.’

Neil assumes that he means he remembers kicking Neil’s ass on the roof. That was the first time they ever saw each other.

‘Do you know why you and Aaron look so much alike, why you have the same last name?’, Neil asks. He can try, but he has a feeling Andrew’s talkative moment is over.

Andrew puts out his cigarette and gets up to go back inside. Neil follows.

He stretches out on the couch and takes a nap. When he wakes up, Andrew is sleeping in the armchair.

-

Andrew is still asleep in the armchair in the morning. Neil goes to the gym. When he comes back, Andrew is gone. He asks Reynolds’ AI, but the mechanic voice tells him Andrew isn’t in the building.

Neil should have known, he _knew_ , that Andrew was going to run if confronted with the people outside Neil’s floor. All Andrew wanted was to be away from people, who in his world equal pain and manipulation and danger.

Neil didn’t do that for him.

Mostly he just sulks and works out until Matt comes to drag him to the common dining room for dinner in the evening. 

Neil is quiet, which isn’t unusual. Matt seems to realize that there’s a specific reason tonight, and sends questioning and worried looks Neil’s way, but doesn’t comment.

Neil goes back to his floor as soon as he’s finished eating. He runs on the treadmill in his private gym for a while, hating that Andrew put away all of the weights he used, like he was never there at all. 

Neil falls asleep in the armchair in the living room.

When he wakes up at three am, Andrew is sleeping on the couch. He’s not really awake enough to question it. In the morning, he’s still there. In the light coming through the windows, Neil can see what he didn’t at night: Andrew’s face is covered in the familiar splatter of blood Neil has seen in the mirror so many times before. After missions, after shooting more people than he ever wanted to. Andrew looks down at his own hands, which have a bit of blood on them as well and heads for the shower.

They watch reality TV for a while. Neil is Keeping Up With The Kardashians because it really pisses off most of the team, although Allison is delighted and discusses the Kardashians’ life choices with him during breakfast sometimes. Andrew seems to like it as well. It’s not always easy to tell, but he’s paying attention, that counts for something. 

They watch a couple of Friends episodes after that. Neil has seen all of them before, but Andrew hasn’t. He predictably doesn’t laugh at any of the jokes, but when Neil suggests they could do something else after the first episode ends, Andrew shakes his head and puts on another one.

It’s the first time that they sit beside each other on the couch instead of both having their own seat. It’s not necessarily significant to Neil. He’s spent enough movie nights squeezed in between Dan and Matt on the couch to have grown used to it. He’s pretty sure it’s different for Andrew, though. He glances at Neil every now and then, as if to make sure he’s keeping his distance.

Eventually Neil goes to the Tower’s common gym and when he comes back, Andrew is lifting weights in the gym on his floor. 

Neil has a conference call with a bunch of government officials, mostly military, in a few hours, so he takes a shower and puts on a button-up. He wears sweats underneath, but the webcam’s only gonna be showing his head and shoulders, so that doesn’t matter.

He combs his hair, uses some of the make-up Reynolds gave him to smoothen out the harshest of his scars. He doesn’t want to look threatening. He doesn’t want to look like the HYDRA agents whose files these people have been reviewing for weeks. 

Andrew stays in the gym, so Neil tries to read a book. He never finished high school, and even from the grades he did finish, he doesn’t remember anything useful, so he got himself a couple of advanced placement textbooks and he’s lugging through them one by one. 

He likes math best. Physics is fine, but chemistry is difficult and biology bores him to death. 

History is frustrating, because things from before the ice are different from what he’d expect, and things from during the ice all went to shit. He’s gone on a talk show before, the fourth of August when everyone was commemorating the two cities that were wiped out by atomic bombs and he talked about how much of a shit decision the nukes had been. Some people dismissed him because he wasn’t there, he couldn’t say what decision was the right one because he couldn’t fully understand the circumstances. A lot of people were uncomfortable disagreeing with him, though. He had been the US Army’s most important strategist for four years of the Second World War. He knew what the fuck he was talking about.

When it’s time, he goes into a barely used study on his floor. Normally there’s supposed to be a lawyer with him for stuff like this, but he fired him. He prefers to represent himself.

‘Mr. Wesinski,’ a guy with a lot of shiny things pinned to his chest says. There’s six in total. All white men. The vice president, for some reason. General Ross, who is now secretary of state. The minister of defense. The other three are generals like Ross. It’s one of those guys who just said Neil’s old name.

‘I could sue you for that, sir, I thought you’d know that.’ Neil has learned very early on that the easiest way to piss off a general is to refer to them as anything other than ‘general’.

‘This doesn’t have to be a long conversation, Captain Josten,’ the vice president says before things can escalate. ‘We want to know if you’re still interested in going to Syria.’

‘Of course I am, Mr. vice president.’ That he treats the vice-president with the necessary respect pisses off the asshole general even more.

‘You would be a valuable asset in our black ops team, Captain. You have the experience and training necessary.’

‘I think you misunderstand why I’d want to go to Syria. I want to keep your men safe. And I want to keep Syrians safe. I’m not interested in assassinating people just because they threaten your oil reserves.’

‘Our team has saved countless lives.’

‘I’m sure they have, and I’m very grateful for that. A war for oil and money just isn’t a war I want to be part of. I want to save lives, not kill even more people. If I’m going to Syria it’s not with them. I already had a regular unit I could go with. I can avoid casualties on both sides. The numbers are going to look better in the press.’

‘None of the numbers have to make it into the press,’ one of the generals says.

‘Look, I’ve told you where I want to be.’ He already knows that they aren’t going to let him go. He’s more trouble than he’s worth, they learned that from Afghanistan. He’s spoken out about war crimes committed by the US, about the absolute uselessness of the war, about the people who profit from it. He’s going to do exactly the same if he goes now, and if he isn’t even on their black ops team, it’s just not worth it.

‘Yes you have. I’m afraid we cannot offer you access to Syria after all. The offer stays open, should you change your mind.’

‘Thank you, sirs. It was very nice talking to you.’ He doesn’t wait for any kind of official dismissal before he breaks the connection. 

He keeps his temper for the gym. Andrew’s still there, but he’s at the other side of the room. 

Neil spends a few minutes trying to murder a boxing bag before it breaks and all of the sand spills out. Reynolds made him reinforced ones he can punch however much he likes without them breaking, but they aren’t nearly as satisfying as the ones that break.

Andrew puts away his weights. ‘Let’s spar,’ he says.

Sparring is nice. Neil is maybe a little meaner than he has to be, but Andrew takes his blows without any effort. He wins five out of eight rounds.

The ninth round is cut short unexpectedly. Neil manages to knock Andrew off his feet and keeps him pressed to the ground with an arm over Andrew’s shoulder blades. He waits for Andrew to retaliate, to elbow him in the stomach or throw Neil off of him, but he stays completely still under Neil.

Neil sits back on his knees, but even when he lets go, Andrew doesn’t move. ‘Andrew?’, he says, as gently as he knows how. ‘What’s going on?’

Andrew doesn’t react, he doesn’t move. He looks pale. His hands are shaking. His eyes squeezed shut.

‘Did I hurt you?’

Finally, Andrew opens his eyes. He focuses on Neil. He manages to get an arm underneath him and starts to push himself up. ‘Leave,’ he says, voice cracking.

Neil does.

-

Andrew stays on his part of the floor the rest of the day. Neil keeps asking Reynolds’ AI if he’s still there, afraid that whatever Neil did wrong in the gym is going to send Andrew running. He asks the AI to make sure he’ll eat, then heads down to the common kitchen for dinner.

Nicky is cooking. Neil thinks Matt is probably supposed to help him, but he’s just sitting on the counter and steals food out of Nicky’s frying pans, either eating it himself or tossing it over to Walker who’s sitting at the table. She catches the bits of food by piercing them with her claws and eats them like that.

‘Neil!’, Matt exclaims enthusiastically. ‘Do you wanna watch us get drunk tonight?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on,’ Nicky chimes in. ‘You barely hang out with us anymore.’

‘I never hung out with you guys.’

‘Yeah, but sometimes we forced you to watch movies with us. That was fun, right? And you came to dinner almost every evening.’

‘That was when Kevin was staying with Dr. Muldani. Now he’s – here,’ he says while Kevin walks into the kitchen.

‘I’m much prefer to get drunk on my own, so you can’t use me as an excuse to get out of tonight,’ says Kevin. He’s useless, like always.

‘Okay, I’ll be there, but you guys have to keep up with me.’ He can’t get drunk. At least it’ll be fun to watch Matt and Nicky get smashed drinking everything he drinks.

‘Deal,’ Matt says, grinning.

Nicky serves dinner not much later and Neil bickers with Kevin through the whole thing because that always manages to piss everyone off. The others try to ignore them.

Reynolds and Walker have propped their feet up on each other’s chairs and are discussing something quietly. Matt, Nicky and Dan are debating whether Nicky could out-sling one of Matt’s arrows or not and Aaron is listening to Walker and Reynolds’ conversation, though he’s not adding anything. It’s unusual that he’s here for dinner at all.

He leaves as soon as he’s done eating, and Kevin retreats to his own floor as well. The rest of them gather around the coffee table in the main living room, on the couches and on the floor in front of the couches. Reynolds gets booze (and lemonade for Walker) and Neil does shots with them until Nicky gets to the point where he’s a little too drunk to be annoyingly talkative. He’s leaning against Neil, arm around his shoulder, and Neil is letting him because it’s not worth the trouble to do anything about it. 

Nicky claims he only likes being close to Neil because of his above-average body heat, but Kevin runs even warmer than Neil does, and he’s never seen Nicky cuddling up to him.

They’re listening to a very nonsensical argument between Reynolds and Dan about Frisbees and who’d be the best at throwing them. Neither of them is talking very clearly, but the main point of discussion seems to whether Hulk can hold a Frisbee long enough to throw it, or if he’d just crush it in his hand.

Neil makes eye-contact with Walker where she’s gently dragging her fingers through Reynolds’ hair and they grin at each other. He doesn’t trust her in the slightest, there’s a danger about Walker that he can sense but doesn’t understand, but this, their friends all happy and carefree and soft, that’s something they have in common, something they both enjoy.

That’s when Reynold’s AI chimes to get their attention. ‘Captain Josten, your presence is required on your floor.’

Nicky leans away, his hand caressing Neil’s arm when Neil gets up. ‘See you guys,’ Neil mutters. The others tell him good night cheerfully while he heads for the elevator. Matt complains drunkenly that he’s leaving too soon, but Dan shushes him. 

‘What’s going on?’, he asks when the elevator doors have closed behind him.

‘Mr. Minyard is currently attempting to hurt himself. There are protocols in place for these situations, but they are not working.’

‘And you think making me help will work?

‘Mr. Minyard respects you, sir.’

‘What exactly is he doing?’

‘Cutting himself, sir.’

The elevator finally gets him to his floor. ‘Bathroom closest to Mr. Minyard’s bedroom,’ the AI says helpfully while the elevator doors slide open.

Neil jogs to the door and knocks. ‘Andrew?’

There’s no answer.

‘Andrew? I want to make sure you’re okay. Can I come in?’

A pause, then, ‘No.’

‘That’s okay. I’m gonna wait outside, though. I really want you to be okay. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.’

‘Shut up,’ Andrew says. ‘I hate you.’

‘That’s okay. I’ll leave you alone if you want. I just want to help you take care of your wounds first.’

There’s no answer.

‘There’s a first aid kit under the sink.’

He can hear Andrew opening the cupboard under the sink, but he doesn’t hear him take anything out, as if he’s just checking if Neil is telling the truth.

‘I don’t want you to be in pain,’ Neil says softly. He’s surprised that it’s really true. The thought of Andrew hurting causes an uncomfortable feeling in Neil’s chest.

He hears Andrew get up and the lock of the door clicks.

‘Can I come in?’, Neil asks again.

‘No.’

‘Can I know why you’re hurting yourself?’

There’s a long silence. ‘Yes,’ Andrew says eventually. Another silence. ‘I want to stop remembering. I’m the only one who can hurt me.’

Neil thinks maybe that last part is something he understands. He became a super soldier after years of experiments and pain. For a long time, jumping out of windows and walking into enemy territory with only six rounds in his gun were the only kinds of things that made him feel like he was in control of his own body. He got shot because his own choices led him to be on the wrong side of that gun. He got hurt because he chose to jump out of a moving car. These were the scars that he used to cherish. Proof that he was reclaiming his body. That he was in control again.

‘Maybe there’s other ways to stop remembering. There’s all kinds of stuff we could try.’

‘Sparring worked, but now not anymore.’

‘In the gym downstairs there’s a simulation chamber. We can go fight aliens for a while?’

‘I want to sleep first.’

‘Does sleeping help you stop remembering?’

‘A little.’

‘Can I take care of your wounds first?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can I come in?’

‘Yes.’ 

Neil can’t help a relieved sigh.

He opens the door slowly. Andrew is sitting on the floor. One sleeve of his black sweater is pulled up. His right wrist, the one that isn’t made out of metal, is red with blood. His face is completely blank.

Neil wets a washcloth and sits down opposite Andrew. He moves slowly, so that Andrew has time to tell him to stop. He takes Andrew’s left hand and wipes the blood from his wrist as gently as he can. There’s a lot of scars on Andrew’s wrist. Some jagged, some perfectly straight, some so old they’re almost completely faded. All of them look like they’re self-inflicted. He only made five new cuts, for which Neil is relieved.

Neil dabs Andrew’s wrist dry with a fluffy towel once the cuts have stopped bleeding.

‘Do you have scars?’, Andrew asks, looking at his own wrist. ‘Except on your face.’

Neil has gotten used to the scars on his face in the last few years. It’s hard to be ashamed of them when everyone is constantly staring at them. He wears them proudly, talks about them openly. He just did it because it was the easiest way to cope at first. Some days he had to force it, had to push away the self-conscious feeling whenever he thought of his own face, but he always tried. Life is hard enough without hating the face you see in the mirror every morning. 

Then a woman with marks as bad as his on her face came to thank him, eyes brimming with tears. After that it wasn’t hard to love his scars anymore. He didn’t hate her scars. He didn’t hate anyone else’s. So why hate his?

When he wears T-shirts, the scars on his arms are visible, too, but those are mostly from battle. He’s comfortable with those, too. It’s the ones under his shirt that he has the hardest time with. They are memories of his father, of Lola. He doesn’t always remember exactly how they came to be on his skin, but he remembers the pain, the fear, the panic. These aren’t scars of a battle bravely fought, of an enemy faced head on. He tried to run, to hide, to cower away. They are the traumas of a younger, more naive Neil. Neil tries to stay disconnected from that part of his past, but he’s protective of that Neil, the Neil who didn’t deserve to suffer.

Andrew has shown him his own scars, though. Which he must have been inflicting on himself since an early age, which speak of fear and pain, too.

Neil puts down the towel and takes off his shirt.

He gets out the first aid kit and starts disinfecting and bandaging Andrew’s wounds while Andrew studies his scars. Neil knows what his chest looks like. It’s a mess of scarring in different shapes and colors. The silver ones that healed well, the darker brown and purple ones that got infected or reopened.

Andrew reaches up with his right hand. ‘Yes or no?’, he asks.

Neil doesn’t have to think about it. ‘Yes.’

Andrew touches the place where he shot Neil in the shoulder months ago. It’s healed cleanly into a small raised circle almost the same color as Neil’s skin. His hand drifts up to the large, triangular burn scar on Neil’s shoulder, then down to the cuts and bullet wounds on his chest. He stops at a wide cut that runs across Neil’s abdomen and pulls his hand away.

Neil stays focused on his task the entire time. It’s only a couple seconds more before he’s done bandaging Andrew’s wrist.

They get up. Neil puts his shirt back on while Andrew puts the first aid kit away.

Neil figured Andrew would go to his own room to sleep, but he heads out to the living room, so Neil follows. Neil takes the couch and to his surprise, Andrew settles on the other side of it instead of sitting down in an armchair. 

Neil listens to Andrew’s breathing until he falls asleep.

-

Matt shows up on their floor at noon. 

Neil just hears the sound of the elevator stopping at their floor, but Andrew says ‘Matt,’ with enough certainty that Neil doesn’t question it. If Andrew has better hearing than Neil does, he’s gonna be a little jealous.

Matt finds them in the living room. He’s hungover, but that has never stopped him from being cheerful before.

‘Lunchtime!’, he says, then cringes at the loudness of his own voice. ‘I no longer love alcohol,’ he murmurs. ‘Dan and Nicky are out getting cheesecake for their hangovers. Aaron and Kevin are somewhere in the Tower, but neither of them is invited to lunch, so now’s the time to talk to Allison. Renee and her are already in the kitchen. Renee made fajitas. She sort of burned the scrambled egg somehow, but I wouldn’t mention it if I were you.’

Andrew’s watching Matt from his armchair. Matt greets him belatedly, but enthusiastically. He seems to have forgotten that Andrew almost strangled him two days ago.

Andrew gets up first and Neil follows. Neil should shower before he spends time around other people, but he wants to get this over with, so the shower will have to wait.

They’re quiet in the elevator. While they’re walking to the kitchen, Neil thinks to ask: ‘Don’t you think it’s weird to just walk in?’

‘This is gonna be weird no matter what you do,’ Matt answers and that’s that.

Walker and Reynolds are eating while Reynolds taps away on her tablet. They look up long enough to greet the three, but not to notice Andrew.

‘Allison?’, Neil starts. He rarely calls her Allison, he hopes it will soften her a little. ‘Do new people need your permission to move in?’

She looks up at him momentarily. ‘Yeah. Is someone moving in?’

‘Yep. Allison, this is Andrew.’

Andrew stands slightly behind Neil, close enough that their shoulders are touching, which is new.

Reynolds finally looks away from her tablet and at Andrew. Neil can see the exact moment she realizes he isn’t Aaron.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh, wow. You got taste, Neil. And a thing for Aaron, apparently.’

‘That’s rude,’ Renee says. She’s studying Andrew as well. ‘It’s nice to meet you, Andrew.’

Unsurprisingly, he ignores her.

‘So Andrew is moving in with you?’, Reynolds asks. She has that sly smile on her face that means she’s going to win a bet.

Neil considers lying. ‘Already has,’ he admits instead. ‘For almost a month.’

To his surprise, Allison grins. ‘That’s why you’ve stayed on your floor so much. Super soldier sex probably lasts days. Good for you, Neil. Why with an Aaron-lookalike, though?’

‘Rude,’ Walker murmurs again. ‘What Allison is trying to say is that we’re very glad you’re here, Andrew. We’re just a little confused because you look so much like a friend of ours. His name is Aaron.’

Neil can feel Andrew’s eyes on him, as if to say, _these are your friends, you explain it._

‘We honestly don’t know how it’s possible,’ Neil admits. ‘They have the same last name, too, but Andrew was born in the same year I was.’

‘And Aaron is almost forty,’ Reynolds ads. ‘You look maybe twenty.’

‘Maybe Aaron is a clone,’ Matt says. ‘They age faster. And the Army is totally cloning people. I saw it on YouTube.’

'That could explain why everything known about Aaron before his twenty second birthday is a lie,’ Renee says

Everyone looks at her.

'His file has a normal amount of detail from the moment he's twenty two. Before that, there's just really general stuff. His medical records are stolen. An exact match with a kid who went to a hospital Aaron worked at for some months in Minnesota. His graduate degree is fake. His high school degree, too. There's no record of him in either his elementary school, high school or graduate school. The aunt he claims to have lived with has been dead for five decades. It's like he didn't actually exist for the first twenty two years of his life.'

'Why did you never mention this before?', Neil asks.

'It didn't seem relevant before.'

Matt sighs. 'Can't we just ask Aaron?'

Neil laughs. 'Yeah, because Aaron always answers questions honestly.'

‘So, what then? Aaron is not only a Hulk but also a clone. That’s just something we’re not going to talk about?’, Matt says.

Reynolds shrugs. ‘It doesn’t really change anything, does it?’

‘He’s a clone!’, Matt says empathically. ‘I feel like that changes things. What if he doesn’t even know?’

‘We don’t know for certain that he is a clone,’ Walker counters. ‘It’s one possible explanation for the gaps in his file. There are other possibilities.’

‘Like what?’

Walker shrugs. ‘Maybe Ross put him through a training program that started much earlier than we know, maybe he just wanted to get rid of his past. There’s a ton of options, most of which we can’t even imagine.’

Matt throws up his hands. ‘So we should ask him!’

‘Again,’ Neil says. ‘it’s Aaron we’re talking about. He isn’t going to tell us anything.’

‘And it doesn’t matter. Nothing that doesn’t affect his work does.’ Reynolds is busy on her tablet again, apparently having decided the conversation is over.

‘Andrew, Neil, would you like some fajita’s?’, asks Renee. ‘I made vegetarian ones for you, Neil.’

Just like that the discussion ends. Matt is probably going to bring it up again at some point, but for now the five of them sit down and eat their fajitas.

Andrew keeps his eyes either on his food (which he rips into small shreds before he eats it) or on Neil. He doesn’t join the conversation at any point, but Neil is just glad he’s there at all.

They finish their food, but only leave the kitchen when Reynolds’ AI informs them Nicky and Dan are currently in the parking garage and might be headed for the kitchen.

Reynolds tries to convince them to tell the others about Andrew (Neil thinks it’s mostly because she wants to win her bet), but Neil decides it can wait.

‘Aaron is not my clone, we’re twins,’ Andrew says when they’re in the elevator.

Neil isn’t really surprised, just confused. How can one twin be from 1917 and the other from the eighties? ‘Why didn’t you tell the others that?’

‘If they think Aaron is my clone, they won’t tell him I’m here. If they think he’s my brother, they will.’

‘You don’t want to see him?’

Andrew shakes his head.

Neil takes a shower, then he checks with the AI if the gym is clear and Andrew and him head for the simulation chamber.

He AI helps Neil configure a simulation with two different types of aliens that both just want to pick a fight. He’s not sure whether long or short range combat would be best for Andrew right now, with how their sparring session ended, but Andrew decisively picks short range. He straps a ton of simulation-compatible guns and knives to the combat gear he’s cobbled together from replacements Reynolds has at the ready should anyone ever need them. Then he takes the biggest rifle available and heads into the chamber. Neil is right behind him, with just two guns, a knife and his real shield (Reynolds didn’t exactly have any Vibranium to spare to make a replica for the simulation, and no other metal has the same attributes). Neil tosses Andrew a small earpiece so they’ll be able to communicate.

They spend five hours in the simulation, beating up aliens and even making it to the portal through which one type of alien is making it into their world. It’s a small portal, nothing like the one Riko opened for the Chitauri army years ago. Andrew and Neil take it out together, then go after the landing strip where the other aliens are exiting their ships. (The simulation chamber is huge and neatly sends them in circles so that they never run into a wall.)

Neil is fighting off the aliens and somehow loses track of Andrew. He only realizes where he is when one of the alien ships takes off and flies right into the other three, successfully killing most of the aliens still on the ships.

‘Andrew!’, he shouts. All he can hear over the comm line is static. He punches his way through the aliens, towards the now smoking ships, until the aliens start do dissipate and all that’s left is Andrew and him in the empty chamber.

‘What the fuck?’, Neil shouts, completely out of breath.

All of the solid material in the simulations in made out of holograms and little black magnet-like pieces that can form any shape together. In a scenario like the one Andrew just put himself in, the little magnets would wrap around his body like armor to protect him, which Andrew couldn’t have known.

Andrew is sitting on a pile of the little magnets. They must have formed the ship before the simulation ended. He stares blankly at Neil and doesn’t say a thing.

He’s out of breath, too. His hair is disheveled and his cheeks are faintly red. He looks different from yesterday, after the sparring session. More at ease. Neil wants to be mad at him for simulation-killing himself, but it’s hard when Andrew looks so good, so peaceful. Neil doesn’t think he’s seen him like this before. He’d say Andrew looked giddy, if Andrew were capable of such a feeling.

‘I need a shower,’ Neil says, and heads for the elevator, stopping in the room outside the chamber to leave his gear and weapons for Reynolds’ bots to put away. Andrew follows him.

-

Allison starts inviting Andrew and Neil over for every meal and every activity she can through her AI. Neil has practice in participating just enough not to annoy everyone, so about three times every week, they end up in the main kitchen or the living room. 

Neil is sort of jealous of Andrew. Everyone respects his space and his silence. No one sits too close to him. No one asks any invasive questions. 

Neil doesn’t have such luck.

Currently he’s playing Monopoly with everyone except Kevin and Aaron. (Nicky and Dan are at almost every team activity, so Neil gave Allison permission to tell them about Andrew. Surprisingly, neither reacted too crazily, though Andrew’s glare might have had something to do with that.) Andrew is sitting beside him, their knees touching as Andrew studies the rules of the board game in a little booklet the rest of them are ignoring. Dan is draped over Neil’s other shoulder. Neil and Andrew are playing as a team because there’s only six pieces to play with, but neither of them have played Monopoly before, so Dan is helping them out.

All of her help seems to involve screwing Matt into bankruptcy, and unsurprisingly he’s out in twenty minutes. Neil doesn’t get why everyone seems to like the game so much, especially when Allison and Renee start glaring at each other like Allison is going to suit up and they’re going to have one of their epic sparring sessions. Then Andrew leans closer to him and mumbles in his ear, ‘Just buy the next thing you land on and put a ton of hotels on it.’ and Neil doesn’t really mind the game so much anymore. He keeps doing that throughout all of the game (which goes on for hours), leaning close to Neil and murmuring instructions into his ear. It makes Neil feel weirdly warm, but he tries not to think too much about that.

-

Neil is surprisingly happy with his life. He knows he could be more useful in Syria, but he’s been donating a lot of the money he’s accumulated over time to charities active in the region. He publicly opposes the war and the US’s involvement and Allison tells him one day at breakfast that her lawyers are providing legal assistance for refugees in five different countries. That makes him feel a little less restless.

He settles in a routine. It involves a lot of sleeping and working out and smoking with Andrew on the balcony. After a while, Andrew decides he wants to try sparring again, and mostly it goes well. They spend time with the rest of the team (avoiding Kevin and Aaron isn’t hard, since neither likes being around their teammates anyway) and Andrew starts to open up to them slightly. He speaks sometimes and doesn’t stick to just Neil anymore. He makes a cake with Nicky and works out with Renee and spars with Dan a couple times and Neil sticks around to watch instead of heading for the shower after his own workout, because Dan and Andrew have a similar fighting style, have both made it into an art, and the way they move together, fast and decisive and elegant, is just really fucking beautiful.

When they’re done and Andrew goes for the showers, he sees Neil and looks faintly surprised, then he turns up one corner of his mouth in what Neil has learned to interpret as a smile.

They usually sleep in the living room, on either side of the couch. It’s a little ridiculous, when the floor they live on has a ton of perfectly good beds, but Neil finds Andrew’s presence comforting. It’s grounding not to wake up alone after a nightmare, and Andrew seems to feel the same way, since he rarely sleeps anywhere else anymore.

Neil doesn’t have nightmares often. He usually forgets his dreams as soon as he wakes up, even if he’s so sweaty that he knows he must have dreamt of something traumatic. Sometimes, though, he wakes up screaming, memories of pain and his father’s voice stuck in his head. Andrew is right there in front of him, grabbing the back of Neil’s neck and talking him through the ensuing panic attack. 

Andrew holds onto Neil’s wrist when they try to fall asleep again. He only lets go in the morning.

Neil doesn’t feel guilty that these touches have slowly started meaning more to him than they should.

-

Andrew can’t go with them on missions. He seems annoyed whenever they have to leave, but never asks to come. He’s still the Winter Soldier. There’s people out there who know exactly how to make Andrew stop thinking and fall in line (Andrew told him there’s trigger words, even certain touches that just make his mind go blank until he comes back to himself soaked in blood), he’s too much of a risk.

They always take the time to say goodbye before they leave, Andrew holding onto Neil’s wrist like he isn’t going to let go. Sometimes he grabs the back of Neil’s neck and stands so close to him that they’re almost touching. 

Despite Andrew’s absence, Neil likes missions. He’s made to be a soldier. He’s at his best when he’s strategizing or fighting or getting people to safety. 

This time there’s a guy who calls himself Bad Wolf and is doing experiments on both animals and humans. It’s a fairly simple mission. He only has six henchmen and it should only take a couple hours before Bad Wolf and his friends are being shipped off to the police office while ambulances and random transport take the humans to a hospital and the animals to veterinaries. 

Matt, Dan, Renee and Neil storm Bad Wolf’s lair, which is an abandoned warehouse, unsurprisingly. The others are on stand-by, but shouldn’t be needed. 

Neil’s job is to get the humans out of their literal cages, so he gets to it, bashing in locks with his shield. He’s breaking open the cage of three young men when one of them gasps. 

‘Look out!’, he shouts, just as Neil feels a needle sink into his neck. He’s used to people trying to sedate him, they never get the –

Everything goes black.

-

When he comes to, he feels like his head is filled with cotton. They must have gotten the dosage right after all, which is a worrying surprise.

He’s in a large room that he can’t see the walls of. There’s only cabinets in front of him, the old-fashioned ones that were used to hold files before people started digitizing everything. He’s in a chair, held by restraints. He tests them, but they don’t budge. There’s screens on either side of him, but they’re turned off.

He tries to shake himself out of his daze, to push harder against the restraints. All of the tech reminds him of SHIELD, which means he’s probably in a HYDRA base

There’s only six guards. They all have guns, but he’s won against worse odds before. One of them steps forward and backhands him harshly. Not hard enough to do any damage, but his message is clear. _Stop struggling._

Neil does. He doesn’t usually give up fighting this easily, but the restraints are obviously adjusted to his strength. It’s better to wait for his body to recover fully from the sedatives before he tries anything else.

The guards straighten when a man walks in, flanked my more guards. Behind him are two men in off-white shirts and even more guards. He himself is wearing a three-piece suit, like he’s on his way to some fancy corporate meeting. 

Neil recognizes him. His name is Drake Spear. He’s Secretary of the World Security Council. Neil has been introduced to him before at a gala where Neil was a little distracted because he was working a mission. He remembers him vaguely. He’s important, about the same age as Wymack, who was Director of SHIELD until he went undercover after the whole HYDRA mess. 

Spear likes war, likes being in control of everything. He’s not a big fan of the Avengers for the exact reason that he doesn’t control them. After the fall of SHIELD, he was one of the few people still standing up unscathed.

There’s a mean glitter to his eyes, like he’s thinking of hurting someone right now.

‘Captain, what an honor,’ he says, voice mild. ‘I’m afraid I can’t offer you much entertainment while we wait. As much as I’d like to take you apart, there isn’t time. Our prodigal son is already on his way.’

He’s not really sure who Spear is referring to. There’s one option he can think of, but he doesn’t like it. Not at all.

Neil gives him his most innocent expression. ‘I’m sorry, sir, who are you again? I meet a lot of people, it’s hard to remember all of them.’

He doesn’t really have any plan right now except for being an ass, which should keep Spear talking until Neil can come up with a better plan, hopefully helped by some accidental information reveals by Spear.

‘You know who I am, Captain. And you know why you’re here. You’ve taken what is mine. I’m not a big fan of sharing, especially not something so sweet.’

That confirms that Spear is after Andrew. It fills Neil with panic, which is quickly replaced by anger. Spear is the one who screwed up Andrew’s entire life. Who tortured him and brainwashed him for decades.

He tries the restraints again, and he hears something snap. The other people present must have heard it, too. The guys in the white shirts shuffle backwards, and some of the guards look uncomfortable, too.

He breaks one arm out of the restraints at the same time part of the ceiling collapses.

Nicky, red and blue Spider-man suit on, lands on the floor and webs up three guards at a time until they’re all down. Dan, Matt and Kevin come down out of the hole in the ceiling, too. Last comes Andrew.

Nicky cuffs the two unarmed guys and starts rounding everyone up while Dan comes over to Neil’s weird chair and helps him out of his remaining restraints.

Surprisingly, Spear doesn’t seem to have a gun on him. Or he has one and doesn’t pull it, confident his Soldier will defend him.

‘Soldier,’ he says steadily. ‘Engage.’ He smirks. ‘You’ll be rewarded before you next wipe. And af-’

He’s interrupted by a bullet piercing his skull. Andrew’s face is completely blank. He looks like an empty shell where he’s standing across the room, rifle raised. He walks closer to Spear’s collapsed body cautiously, like he’s afraid it’ll come back to life.

Neil is helping Dan power up the computers (there are five separate ones, for some reason) to sweep all of the information from them before they destroy them. He flinches and turns at the first gunshot, but not at the next three. Andrew has shot Spear in the head once more, then three times in the chest. His chest is heaving like he just ran for miles, but he still looks hollow.

He keeps his rifle pointed at the dead body and looks up at Neil. ‘Did he touch you?’

‘What?’, Neil asks. His metabolism still hasn’t worked through all of the sedatives, and this whole situation is going too fast to process.

‘Did he touch you?’, Andrew repeats, prodding at Spear with his gun.

Neil shakes his head. ‘No, I’m fine.’

Dan and him finish taking care of the computers while Nicky, Kevin and Matt round up all the guards in one place and contact authorities. It’s the most annoying part of SHIELD’s collapse. They have to involve other parties for cleanup. The police is going to want to know who shot Spear, but hopefully there’s enough dirt on him in the files Dan got from the computer to make the police relieved he’s dead instead of in the jail in their police station.

Matt flies them back to the Tower in the Quinjet. Andrew sits away from the rest of the group the entire time and stares blankly into space. Dan keeps giving Neil looks like he should do something about it, but he has no idea what.

He takes a shower as soon as they get back. Andrew is showering in another bathroom, and he isn’t done yet when Neil comes out.

Neil goes down to Dan and Matt’s floor.

‘You okay?’, Dan asks when he gets there.

‘I’m fine,’ Neil says. 

She just rolls her eyes and opens up her laptop. ‘Doesn’t Andrew want in on this?’

Neil shakes his head. ‘I asked him. He doesn’t want to think about it anymore.’

They spend the rest of the day going through the HYDRA files. They’re all related to the Soldier’s ‘maintenance’, and detail exactly what kinds of treatments they used, what meds, what manipulations. It’s everything they’d been trying to figure out all this time. A first step towards getting Andrew cleared for the field. A strong defense should he ever have to appear in front of a court.

They’re not being very thorough right now, just clicking through the files to get an overview of what’s in there. There’s a folder full of video files and Dan opens the first one to see what they’re about. Neil expects it’s going to be the weird chair, which was used for memory wipes, or surveillance of training sessions. He only realizes what he’s actually looking at after Dan has already clicked the file shut again. 

Neil feels nauseous. He wishes Spear were still alive so he could kill him again. There was another person in the video. Hopefully Neil does get to kill him.

‘He raped Andrew,’ Dan says in a small voice. There are twenty-six files in the folder. She shudders.

‘We should delete those,’ Neil says, trying to compose himself.

‘They could contain relevant information. Reynolds’ AI can sort through the audio and then we’ll delete them. The AI could try and find other copies, destroy those, too.’

‘It should take about thirty minutes,’ the AI answers. ‘I’ll see what I can do about possible other copies.’

Neil gets up. He’s still nauseous. ‘I’m going – I’m gonna go see if Andrew’s okay.’

At least the sedative is out of his system by now.

He finds Andrew in one of the armchairs in the living room. The rifle with which he shot Spear is lying on the floor in front of him.

He’s turned on the TV, which is playing a nature documentary without sound. There’s a fish camouflaging itself in the sand by a coral reef.

Andrew doesn’t react when Neil says his name, so Neil just sits down on the couch and waits. He falls asleep without meaning to, and when he wakes up, Andrew is still just sitting there. It’s gone dark outside the windows and the yellowish light of the documentary, which is now showing snakes in a desert, casts the room in strange shadows.

‘Andrew,’ Neil says again.

Andrew looks up at him. There’s nothing behind his eyes. 

‘He’s dead. He’s dead forever. He didn’t touch me. He’s dead. We’re alive.’ Neil isn’t sure of that’s the right thing to say. It’s what he wants to hear right now. It’s what he wants Andrew to hear.

Andrew sighs deeply, then nods. They’re quiet for a while. Neil is watching the documentary, but turns back to Andrew when he sees him move in his periphery. Andrew turns his flesh and blood arm wrist up. His armbands are covering the cuts, but Neil knows they’re there. ‘I want to cut myself,’ he says, a small frown on his face, like that’s not what he expected to say.

Neil doesn’t think sparring or battle simulations are on the table right now. ‘We could go to the common floor, see if anyone is awake.’

Andrew nods and gets up. In the elevator, he grabs Neil’s wrist for a moment, then lets go and steps away from him, as if he was making sure he’s there at all.

Kevin is watching Renee and Matt play Mario Kart. Neil joins Kevin on the couch while Andrew claims an armchair.

After Renee wins, Neil plays a game against her, then when he loses he plays one against Matt. Matt plays against Kevin, then Kevin asks Andrew if he wants to play against him. To everyone’s surprise, he does.

Andrew’s reflexes are perfect and he wins from Kevin with ease. Neil falls asleep on the couch and when he wakes up, it’s just him, Andrew and Matt.

‘We told Aaron Spear is dead. He seems to hate Spear a lot, says he was involved in the research program that turned him into the Hulk,’ Matt says.

Andrew stiffens a little and Neil remembers his words. _Did he touch you?_

Neil nods, but he doesn’t know what to say. Matt heads off to bed not much later, and Neil and Andrew go back to their own floor.

Neil has slept a lot already, so he tries to read while Andrew sleeps.

Andrew wakes up after a couple of hours and for a while he just looks at Neil.

Then he gets up and walks out of the room. He comes back with a tablet and hands it to Neil. 

‘You don’t remember your childhood,’ Andrew says. It’s not a question.

He doesn’t say anything else and retreats to his armchair to sleep some more while Neil studies the tablet.

There’s a floorplan of his childhood home, that turns out to be a 3D model after Neil messes with it enough. He can look around the rooms and hallways on eye level. He recognizes some.

He finds his bedroom fairly easily. It’s not immediately familiar, but there’s a bed that’s smaller than those in any of the other rooms. There’s toys. A bright orange stuffed fox that he remembers clutching to him while he slept.

He’s surprised at the details. He’s used lay-outs like this before during missions, but none of them ever showed anything beyond basic furniture. There’s a nightstand with a pill bottle. Books he remembers starting but not finishing. A knife, in the corner between the closet and the door, like someone threw it there and no one ever bothered to retrieve it. 

If there’s one thing that Neil remembers about his childhood home, it’s that there were knives in abundance.

There’s multiple kitchens, bathrooms, bedrooms. He finds traces of life in plenty of the bedrooms. He knows Lola lived with them. And people whose names he doesn’t remember, only the way they grinned when they had a knife in their hands.

He finds the white tiled hallway not much later. He knew it would be there, that it would lead to white tiled rooms with silver tables the way you’d find at a mortuary. There are medical tools. Syringes, bottles of different liquids he recognizes immediately. Neil knows there’s different kinds of sedatives among them, and the thing that made him go numb without losing consciousness, and the one that made him stop moving, and a lot of different things that made him feel like he was burning alive.

He wasn’t meant to be a super soldier. He was a test subject. He was the first that didn’t die, that didn’t go crazy or lost any limbs. He turned out exactly how they wanted all soldiers to turn out in the future. They were going to kill him before they went public with the formula. Then Malcolm shot his father and destroyed the formula they were prepping for mass production. Suddenly Neil became the only super soldier there would ever be.

He closes the app on which he was viewing the map of his old house. He’s not sure what Andrew wants to achieve with this. It helps Neil remember, but he isn’t sure he even wants to.

He finds videos (and his stomach makes a painful flip when he opens one, remembering the last video he saw). It’s surveillance footage. A younger Neil is sitting in one of the kitchens. The table he sits at is empty. His feet swing back and forth, the tips of his toes only just touching the floor.

Another boy enters, followed by Neil’s mother, a woman he hardly remembers. ‘Neil, this is Andrew,’ she says, and stands by the door while Andrew takes a seat opposite Neil. Andrew looks incredibly young, both arms made out of flesh.

Little Neil glances up at his mother. ‘Who is he?’

‘He’s here because we’re helping him get better,’ Mary Hatford says. She doesn’t even pretend to believe what she’s saying. The small Neil on screen doesn’t notice her flat tone, anyway.

‘I’m Neil,’ he says to tiny Andrew. Andrew is wearing a white button-up shirt that’s much too big for him and slacks that aren’t his. It’s a sharp contrast to Neil’s well-tailored clothes. 

Andrew tugs uncomfortably at the collar of the shirt. ‘Hello,’ he says. His voice sounds strange, higher than Neil would expect. He’s hopeless at guessing ages and Andrew could be anywhere from eight to sixteen from what Neil can tell. There’s no timestamp in sight, but it must be in the early thirties. Neil is pretty sure his father started to experiment on him in ’35. And Andrew told him he’d been sold to Neil’s father at twelve, which was in ’29.

Andrew and him talk awkwardly. They can’t seem to find anything they have in common, and Andrew, though not as quiet as he is in the present, isn’t much of a talker and says as little as he can without being impolite.

Neil talks about sports for a while. Andrew recognizes a couple of baseball player’s names and nods to everything Neil says. All this time, Mary stands by the door. After thirty minutes, she steps forward and guides Andrew back out of the room.

There’s more videos like this. Most are around thirty minutes long. In the shorter ones, Neil asks about the track marks on Andrew’s arm, about the bruise on his cheek, about the way he can’t move his left arm anymore. Each time Mary steps in before their thirty minutes run out and takes Andrew away early.

Andrew looks different in every video. He gains some muscle, but his cheeks hollow out, then fill out again. There’s dark circles under his eyes. His left hand starts looking a little grey. Sometimes there’s a bruise or a split lip that can’t be hidden under long sleeves or a high collar. Sometimes the sleeves ride up, sometimes the collar comes down.

Neil doesn’t know how much time passes between the videos, but it’s disorienting to see Andrew change so drastically, while Neil only shows the gradual and natural signs of growing older little by little.

In the very last video, Neil is clearly out of it, like he’s been drugged. There’s bruises around his wrists. He has a split lip. He doesn’t say much, and neither does Andrew. They just look at each other. At the end of the video, it’s Neil who gets escorted out instead of Andrew.

Andrew comes to sit beside Neil while he finishes watching the last the video. 

'They were cleaning the white rooms, so they took me into one of the kitchens. You saw me, so they introduced us to keep you from getting suspicious, tried to pretend I was there because I was sick and they could make me better.' 

'Why were you really there?' 

'The super soldier program. My mother... well, it was 1929, the Great Depression. She didn't have the money to take care of the both of us. She was going to give one of us away, and your father offered the most money.' 

'You and Aaron?' Andrew hadn't mentioned Aaron since he told Neil they were brothers.  

Andrew just nods. 'I took his place.' 

They're quiet for a while. 

'You started asking questions,' Andrew says then, continuing the story. 'You found the white rooms and you found the test subjects and then your father found you. They decided that they could use you as a test subject, too, since the other option was you telling other people about their project before they had any useful results. I heard them discussing it.' 

Neil nods. He doesn't remember, but that explains the last video. The screen is frozen on an image of Andrew sitting alone at the kitchen table. 

'Why do you have all this?', Neil asks. 

'I had a mission. Your father sold me to HYDRA after they had to amputate my arm. HYDRA made me kill them all.' 

Neil remembers Malcolm killing his father. He doesn't remember anyone else dying. After that there was the Army and the War and nothing else. Neil never even wondered what happened to his old home. 

Some part of him wants to know if his mother was there when Andrew returned under HYDRA's orders. Another part of him knows it doesn't matter. She married his father. She can't have been a good person. 

Neil puts the tablet on the coffee table and leans back against the couch. He's not used to remembering this much about his past. It's a lot to process. 

Andrew grabs his wrist and they fall asleep again. 

\- 

In the morning, they go for breakfast on the common floor. 

Dan hands him a folded piece of paper, which Neil assumes is the report Reynolds' AI made about the videos from the HYDRA computers. 

He keeps that for after breakfast. He doesn't think he'll have any appetite left after reading it. 

When he looks at it in the elevator back to their floor, Dan has already highlighted the important parts. 

The third person present in the videos turns out to be a man named Dr. Proust. Neil is glad when the next thing it says is: _found dead in a lake near his home._

Reynold's AI has made lists of all the instances restraints or sedatives were used, in what videos Andrew has been wiped before Spear commits his crimes, in which ones Spear mentions Aaron. He scans trough that part quickly, trying not to remember any of it.  

There are only two more things that are highlighted beside Proust's death: 

_Mr. Minyard was wiped after every session._ It makes Neil sort of sad. Dan doesn’t know that the wipes don’t matter, that every single memory comes back to Andrew eventually.

And then: _Number of copies found: 2  
Number of copies destroyed: 2_

Neil hands the piece of paper to Andrew just as the elevator doors are sliding open. 'Proust is dead, the tapes are gone,' is his summary. Andrew takes the piece of paper and disappears to the balcony.  

Neil is pretty sure he isn't going to read it. He's going to burn the piece of paper with a lighter and let the ashes drift down to the New York streets below. 

\- 

They keep sleeping on either side of the couch until Neil gets tired of it and hauls a bed from one guest room to another, so that there's two beds in the one room. 

Andrew's face is hard to decipher when Neil shows him this, but he claims the bed by the wall.

They sleep and they spar and they smoke. Andrew seems to come back from his final encounter with Spear without any permanent damage (Neil can’t help but think that that damage had been done a long time ago already).

Neil wakes up screaming again. Andrew pads over to his bed and crawls under the covers. The bed is wide enough that they can lie well apart, but Andrew does grab Neil’s wrist. They don’t share a bed every night, only when Andrew is doing okay and Neil isn’t.

When Andrew gets bad, they don’t sleep at all. They go out to the balcony wrapped in blankets and watch the lights of the city below.

‘Yes or no?’, Andrew asks on a night like this.

‘Yes,’ Neil says and they lean in at the same time. Kissing Andrew is a lot like sparring with him. Neil likes it. Nothing else compares to it.

They sleep in the same bed that night, and Andrew puts his hand over Neil’s stomach instead of around his wrist.

-

They’re eating breakfast in the main kitchen a few weeks later when Reynolds’ AI chimes. ‘Mr. Minyard is on his way to this kitchen.’

Neil looks at Andrew, who lifts his shoulder in a shrug.

Everyone looks a little tense (except for Kevin, who doesn’t care what happens as long as it doesn’t affect their fighting skills). Aaron has the Hulk under control, but no one really knows how him and Andrew are related. This could go a lot of ways.

When Aaron comes into the kitchen, he’s already halfway done making coffee before he notices the extra person at the table. 

He puts down his mug. ‘Andrew?’

‘Yes. Don’t make a scene.’ Andrew’s tone is flat, more hollow than he’s sounded in weeks. He hasn’t touched the pancakes on his plate yet.

‘How… How are you here?’ He glances around at the rest of the team, as if checking if they can see Andrew, too.

‘You know how I’m here. I don’t know how you’re here.’

Kevin sighs. ‘How can all of you take so long to figure this out? Aaron travelled through time.’

The room erupts in noise right away. They all shout questions over each other, make sounds of disbelief. It takes a moment before anyone notices what Neil is doing.

He’s on top of Aaron in seconds, throwing them both onto the ground and hitting Aaron in the jaw. Neil tries to avoid hitting regular people and tries to hold back when he does, but right now he’s too angry to keep himself in check. ‘You knew! You fucking knew and you did nothing!’

‘Neil!’, someone yells. Dan. ‘You’ll make him Hulk out!’

Aaron’s eyes aren’t even green. Neil hits him again. ‘If you could travel through time you could save your brother, too!’

He hits Aaron again. Dan is yelling at Kevin to get Neil to stop, and eventually Kevin does, hauling Neil away from Aaron without any effort at all. 

Aaron gets up and spits blood into the sink. One of his eyes is already swelling shut.

There’s a tense silence in which everyone tries to process what’s going on.

When no one says anything, Neil figures he should explain. ‘Andrew and Aaron are twins. Their mother sold Andrew to the program that made him into the Winter Soldier. Aaron knew.’

Everyone is looking at Aaron, but he doesn’t say anything.

Andrew’s chair scraping back makes everyone flinch. ‘It was a long time ago,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He turns to Aaron. ‘I like to think that I wouldn’t have saved you, either.’

But he would have. He did. He went to the program instead of Aaron.

Aaron knows it, too. He says nothing, but he looks haunted.

Neil follows Andrew out of the room.

-

Aaron and Andrew don’t talk after that. They tolerate each other, though they don’t have to often, since Aaron is as reclusive as ever. Everyone seems to forgive Aaron, because Andrew seems to have forgiven him, and it’s not really their business anyway.

Neil figures that between Ross, the Hulk and Spear, Aaron has gotten way more punishment than he ever deserved and, although Neil will never forgive him, they settle on a truce.

-

They go to Neil’s cabin in Pakistan a couple weeks later. Allison lends them a private jet. Getting Andrew through an airport and onto a commercial airplane would be impossible.

There’s only one bed, and they both sleep in it every night. Andrew always has a hand on Neil, as if he’s afraid he’s going to disappear if he doesn’t.

‘Yes or no?’, he whispers in the dark.

Neil always says yes.

**Author's Note:**

> I honestly love this AU so much. I'd love to write some short stuff about this in the future, but I should really get on top of my schoolwork first. I already have a couple of ideas, though. Let me know if there's a specific thing/character you want to know more about!
> 
> Title from The Boy Who Blocked His Own Shot by Brand New


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